


Icarus to your certainty

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blatant disregard for the laws of physics, Developing Relationship, Guilt, M/M, Outer Space, Pining, Questionable use of astrophysics concepts, Space AU, Space Stations, Survivor Guilt, stranded in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23485063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: Essek Thelyss is an arrogant researcher trying to reach a black hole on the edge of known space when his mistakes and intellectual zealotry result in the deaths of the rest of the crew and leave him stranded with nothing but a short-range radio. After seven months alone on his space station, the black hole spits out a shuttle, as lost as he is.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 36
Kudos: 280





	Icarus to your certainty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Essek Week 2020 day 7 - prompt: AU
> 
> This got so far out of hand, but I really love how it turned out anyway.
> 
> Title is super predictably from "Sunlight" by Hozier.

The last radio fizzles on and then out into static, and he slams it against a wall, the momentum pushing him toward the center of the claustrophobic little waystation, and he floats there, caught in the gravity of his mistakes.

For the first time in as long as he can remember, he opens his mouth and lets out the loudest scream he can muster. His mother had trained that kind of behavior out of him as a child in favor of calm discipline. _Don’t let anyone hear you cry_ , he remembers her cold voice say. No one can hear him now, orbiting a moon on the edge of known space, without comms or crewmates, without any semblance of hope for rescue. His voice is out of practice, he thinks, because the scream is tinny and weak, dying in his throat.

He can’t even do that right.

With a practiced push of the air, he shuffles along to the next section of the station and into the little pod that operates as his office. The screen is still up with taunting calculations, and he shudders out a breath before he dives into the documents to find out what the fuck went so wrong that his two crewmates are tethered, lifeless, in spacesuits that now float outside their station, and he is stuck here, unable to even retrieve the bodies.

He’d gotten cocky, is what the fuck went wrong. He stopped thinking about the fact that he’s responsible for safety on board the station, complacent with their longstanding successes and arrogant in the knowledge that the people on the ground didn’t know what it was like out here, that he alone was qualified to make decisions on mission actions. 

He got what he wanted anyway. He’s alone with his decisions now.

He slams a fist into his desk again, and the screen flickers, and his heart almost stops as he waits. It stabilizes, and he throws himself onto the chair bolted into the steel ground—wall—it doesn’t matter—and holds his head in his hands, fingers pressed into temples that already pound with tension, and it feels like the pressure of space is crushing into his bones even though he knows that life systems are still running, at least.

How long that’ll last, he doesn’t know. Maybe God does, but he’s never believed in God.

There is no mercy here but the vacuum of space.

Even so, he opens the short-range comms channel from his computer and starts pushing plain old radio waves to the cosmos, and anyone who might be listening.

“Transmission from Rosohna-120, 25 Unndilar 835 PD. My name is Essek Thelyss, and…” he glances out the porthole at a floating spacesuit, lost to him, and a distant star, the central point of the system in which he is now going to die. “And I’m alone.”

—

He adjusts quickly enough to solitude. It’s never been something he’s feared or shied away from—even his crewmates gave him a wide berth before. He almost wishes he’d learned more about them, spoken to them more outside of professional interactions and scientific curiosity, but then again, it’d probably be far worse if he’d known them better.

Seeing their corpses when he passes by some windows is also something he adjusts to. They are frozen there, their skin crushed and turned to ice, and he stops hurrying when he sees them after a while.

He wonders if he’s losing what little piece of him that still knew empathy he’d had left.

—

“Transmission from Rosohna-120, 30 Brussendar 835 PD. I figured out how to bake bread today. Feels like a foolish thing to do when you’re going to die in space, but… what’s so different about that than dying on the ground? You sleep, you wake up, you eat, you sleep again. I might as well learn to bake, eh? End transmission.”

“Transmission from Rosohna-120, 31 Brussendar 835 PD. This station may keep generating food for me indefinitely, though I don’t know how that works well enough to say. In any case, I can ask if for whatever I want, and it always tastes right. I’ve never really appreciated that technology before—food is little more than a utility. But right now it is also the only thing worth living for, and as wondrous as this technology is, it’s hard to feel earned when I know that it’s been synthesized by a machine. If I make the thing myself, the fact that the ingredients have been spat out by my synthesizer is… easier to forget.”

“Transmission from Rosohna-120, 1 Sydenstar 835 PD. Cupcakes admittedly do seem properly wasteful, but they were delicious, so I can’t say I care.”

—

Sometimes he sits by a window for hours and stares and speaks into his little radio, like he’s talking to a friend.

Funny how friends are something he wishes for now, when there are none to find.

There are sounds beyond the foot-thick glass, he knows instinctively, even if he cannot hear them, and he can imagine that maybe the universe is speaking back to him. It’s not a blessing that he deserves, the answers, but they are only imagined, nothing that will become real enough to pull the guilt from him like teeth. 

Survivor’s guilt is only something survivors feel, and he will not survive his own foolishness. He is merely the last one standing, but its predation is slow and constant, and even he will tire of its game eventually.

As time passes so do the planets of this system, some ringed and some barren, one that might support life one day, could be terraformed into something resembling a colony. The last he knew they were sending a mission there as well—less scientific than his own, spearheaded by businessmen with greedy idealism, a belief in something akin to glory, like buying one’s name on a new planet was something to be proud of. An uncle he only acknowledged out of a vague sense of duty to his mother was funding the project, the same way he had funded Essek’s way through the space program. He pretended not to know that kind of thing, pretended that pretending would make it hurt less to know that he is only here thanks to the generosity of men who see him as a child, a pawn on a chessboard. 

He wonders if it will satisfy them to know of his death.

The star of the system sears into his eyes for all of the time he spends looking at it, uncaring for what ruin he is laying to his sight. This desolate void will show him no kindness, and he does not care to see what other things it does present to him for much longer.

He longs for a childhood spent in planetariums and observatories, even before he found the anti-gravity chambers and the simulation flights and the equations that made them all work together, helped him travel halfway across the galaxy in a second. He longs for the wonder that the stars used to bring him.

—

“If I turn myself blind, then regardless of someone finding me, I never have to see Verin’s stupid fucking smirk again. I’m sure he is smirking somewhere, probably at my misfortune as he hops in the nearest transport shuttle so take a quick jaunt across the galaxy to haul me back to Wildemount so he can play the hero again. Or he hasn’t even heard of my downfall yet because he’s in another quadrant on the edge of the universe searching for dragons to slay. 

“I don’t think he’d come for me regardless, though. He always wanted to be a hero, anyways. And I’ve always fancied myself a monster.”

—

He gets philosophical in his boredom, broadcasts all of his thoughts to this unfeeling system, and the gaping maw of its light hurts his eyes but he doesn’t look away. It doesn’t help to ignore the tongue as it swallows you, and he can feel himself sinking further down the universe’s throat with every passing day. 

His computer still offers the catalog of thinkers of old, documents living locally here with him, and as he devours page after page he thinks that he is not alone, he has those that came before him to keep him company. But they are all dead, like the bodies trapped outside the walls of this metal can, and he exists in a kind of purgatory in between life and death.

Purgatory. He scoffs. Maybe he’s growing religious on top of philosophical, but it’s hard to be an atheist here. Agnostic is perhaps a better word for it—if a god exists, then they are unfeeling, for all that his mother tried to convince him of benevolence. He’s never disputed her—that isn’t an argument he cares to lose, because there is no validation in arguing with blind belief. It is only ever a bitter draw, and he is too competitive for that. 

Or he was, when he felt like he might’ve existed, but this far out on the edge of space there is no one to witness him, and perhaps that is why he begins to see the appeal of an entity like a god—whatever its intentions, such a being can at least bare witness to the fact that he is still here.

—

The light of the star outside his window finds its way into his dreams.

He does not so much sleep as rest fitfully every few hours, time losing its meaning without anyone else to hold him accountable to it. But when he does manage to fall into unconsciousness, usually without bothering to shut himself into a sleeping chamber, instead hovering in midair in his office and waking when he bumps into something else. He has always been a light sleeper, but recently these dreams of the star have consumed him, and he wakes up disoriented and upside down and gasping for air.

It doesn’t speak, only screams, and he screams with it. He wakes up with his throat raw and dry, gulping down water that the station synthesizes from atoms, and doesn’t bother to check the closed circuit cameras that could confirm that his screaming passes over into the real world.

Does it matter, really? Everything from sunlight to dreams is real here, as real as he is, which is to say—betrothed to the icy, bittersweet kiss of oblivion. 

—

Maybe the ice of space is the reason he sees the burning red fire of the shuttle that passes by and then circles his station once again and wonders if there is a feeling god. If ice is oblivion, then surely fire is salvation. 

But no, it looks human made, and worn, numbers faded and gauged out as it loops him again, and he doesn’t bother to wave out the window in case someone might come for him. He is not on a vessel a human would recognize, and he himself is not human either, so he almost leaps out of his skin when the radio sitting tucked into the crook of his hip crackles to life.

“Shuttle M9 requesting information, ah, what year is it?”

He blinks at the radio, its lights blinking as it transmits, and it takes him an incredulous moment to remember to respond. All this time spent talking to himself, and he’s forgotten his manners.

“836 PD. This is Station Rosohna-120, may I ask who I’m speaking with?”

He doesn’t know this human, with his odd accent, but he can hear a smile in his voice. “My name is Caleb Widogast. I seem to have lost the rest of my crew. Ah, quite lost, in fact. I don’t think we are in the same galaxy anymore. Perhaps you could help me?”

Essek laughs out loud, sharp and clear, and is startled to find he remembers how to laugh. “Mr. Widogast, unfortunately I believe I am the one in need of your help. I have been stranded here alone for seven months.”

The radio crackles, and Essek wonders not for the first time how much of the fate of their station Rosohna knows, whether a human familiar enough with space travel to have ventured this far would be aware of the arrogance—his arrogance—that caused it.

“Seven months is quite a long time to be alone.”

Whatever answer he’d been expecting, that was not it, and he stares into the static of the radio for a long moment before the man continues.

“Do you have a place for me to board?”

—

Caleb Widogast, as it turns out, is very, very human, in a way that rips Essek’s breath from his lungs. 

He is covered in grime from his ship, nearly falling apart at the seams, but it has gotten him this far, and if the man is to be believed, has traveled through a wormhole on the other side of the galaxy and been spat back out here. His rust-colored hair is coated in it, a sheen of oil that doesn’t quite go away even after he uses the second bathroom on board that Essek’s dead crewmates have left behind. 

He doesn’t offer any explanation for the corpses that hang outside the station, and Caleb Widogast doesn’t ask.

Instead, he offers his own stories, as he eats through a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on warm bread that has just come out of the little oven, as he takes in all aspects of the ship’s tech. This is probably classified, but Essek is so shocked at having someone else—alive, breathing, warm—on board that he makes no move to hide anything, or steer the human away from anything that might be considered more sensitive information.

He’s not even sure what that qualifies as anymore, what kind of research they’ve been doing that would be considered dangerous on their planet.

“I am with, ah, a mercenary crew, out of the Menagerie Coast,” he offers, and Essek thinks he’s either choosing his words carefully, or choosing his words at all in a language that is not quite natural to his tongue. “We have been searching for the husband of one of our members. He is believed to be somewhere in the Beta system.”

“The Beta system?” Essek asks, and thinks about the documents he used to pour over. He has abandoned his clearcut scientific papers for those philosophical musings, not thinking that the science may come in handy yet again. “Mostly mining and resources, isn’t it?”

Caleb nods, and waits until he swallows most of the sandwich before continuing. “Yes. He’s an alchemist, he’d been looking for new materials.”

“Ah. That would make sense, then.”

“I had gone on to scout ahead, and… Well, Frumpkin and I managed to lose control of our shuttle, caught in some force of gravity. The wormhole seems to have pulled us in and deposited us here, in your system.”

“Frumpkin?”

Caleb licks a bit of peanut butter from his thumb and cocks his head. “Do the Kryn not offer pet familiars to their explorers, to keep you company in the coldness of space?”

Essek feels his face flush, thinking of the cat he turned down back in the shuttle bay where it had been offered. Nine months, he’d thought, he could go without the contact of another being for nine months.

That had been thirteen months ago, now, and he isn’t sure how well that cat would’ve fared here with him, but he certainly would’ve appreciated the beast’s presence.

“We do, I simply… don’t have one,” he says, and Caleb looks strangely sympathetic and pats his arm. Essek flushes again at the contact, his sweatshirt sleeves rolled up to his elbow. Caleb’s fingers are warm and alive and he tries hard to suppress the tears that brim to his eyes with the sudden visceral knowledge that he is not alone. 

“That is unfortunate, friend,” Caleb offers, and presses himself to his feet—or as much to his feet as is possible, when they are both floating. He glides away from the bolted table with less grace than Essek has trained himself to use. “Well, I am far too far from the rest of my team to return via shuttle, but perhaps I can bring them here, if I can get my comms system to reach that far.” He looks at Essek with heavy eyes. “I presume you do not have any working comms systems, judging by the fact that you have been here alone for seven months, and I received your broadcast over radio waves.”

There is definitely pink in Essek’s cheeks now, and at the tips of his ears, and he steadies himself against the round frame out of the mess pod. “How much of my broadcasts have you heard?”

“Ah, a few days worth, I believe, based on how long I had been in the wormhole. It must’ve been swept back to me, caught in the opposite direction.”

Essek does the math quickly and wonders where this wormhole might be in, near this system, and if that might mean that some of his transmission might be reaching the Beta System. That is mostly comprised of Empire territory, so they may not know of him there, if any of his delirious musings have made it that far.

Far easier to broadcast one’s hopes and fears and innermost thoughts when no one will hear it—far harder to reconcile the idea that someone might’ve heard it, that he might be alive to be confronted with them. 

The fire of life burning in his hands and his chest suddenly cools again, and he shrinks into himself. “Well. It is—“ he swallows heavily. “It is good to know that someone may have heard my distress calls after all. I thought they might’ve been for nothing.”

“They have brought me here, have they not?” Caleb smiles, as brightly as the sun that Essek has spent seven months burning into his eyes. “So that is certainly not for nothing.”

He pats Essek on the shoulder this time, and pulls himself back toward the two-craft shuttle bay where his shuttle sit beside the smaller one provided to the station. Essek shivers as his warm presences pulls any heat left in the room with him, and Essek reminds himself that he might as well be cold-blooded for all of the warmth that he has ever been able to retain in his bones.

“I think I will sleep in my shuttle, with my cat,” Caleb muses, almost to himself, and Essek wonders how used to talking to himself this strange human is. Just like him. “I am not used to the Kryn’s lack of gravity stabilizers—I don’t know that I could rest like this.”

“It conserves energy. You get used to it.”

“Well, if it has spared energy long enough for you to live to meet me,” Caleb says, and smiles again as he turns back for another moment, “then I suppose it is a worthwhile choice for your space station.” And he vanishes into the shuttle bay, the door closing behind him.

—

In seven months of solitude, Essek has never felt more alone than he does knowing that another person is on his space station.

He isn’t sure when he started considering Rosohna-120 his—it had always only been a place he was occupying, a temporary residence, until it had very suddenly seemed to become his grave. But it was his now, and it has only been his for so long that having someone else occupying the space, even within the privacy of their own shuttle, is disconcerting. 

Space has never felt like a ghost story, as some scientists who have spent time in isolation have offered. No, space always felt like a cradle to him, a place to grow. Now, though, his ears strain to hear movement in the station as he hovers in front of his desk, skimming through texts that feel as though they’ve lost some of its meaning. Philosophy is good for dead men, and perhaps he is no longer a dead man.

Well, for now. There is still an element of purgatory to his existence—if he returns to the Dynasty with any record of what happened to his crew, he will likely be tried and convicted of negligent homicide, at the very least. There is no room for mistakes in space, especially not for dismissive rich boys, and he has made too many. 

It is not a thought he has harbored, in the last seven months. He had not expected any hope of a rescue, and so had not feared for the fate of his soul as well as his body. Now, though, with the possibility of escape with this fiery stranger, he can feel something like remorse setting in at last. It was a sensation he thought he might’ve been free of, yet here he is, sitting wide-eyed rather than peacefully asleep in his quarters.

After enough time in which he can convince himself he has rested, he floats toward the shuttle bay.

Beyond the door, he can hear the mutterings of the voice of his new companion, in a language that now matches the accent rather than the stilted common that he spoke in before. Essek imagines he must be swearing, with the vitriol he channels, and he peers warily around the door before stepping inside.

“ _Schiesse,_ ” Caleb snarls, and lets go of a wire as it sparks from the side panel of his beat up old shuttle. He tugs off a worn pair of goggles, hair half-braided back but now mussed as he removes his headwear. “I may require some pieces, if you have any. I don’t know whether you have any components left of your communications tech.”

Essek nods mutely, thinks back to the one he nearly destroyed that first day of solitude. Surely the pieces of it might be salvageable, where they’ve come to rest in the corridor between the pods. He’s never moved it.

“Good,” Caleb says, and grins again now. He metronomes between rage and elation as he shuffles around his shuttle in the air, and Essek leans against the doorframe with his arms crossed to watch. 

“What else needs repairing? I can assist—“

Caleb waves him off. “I believe the shuttle is fine, nothing significant has been damaged in the hole.” He pulls his goggles back on, hair tufted on either side of it, and picks up a blowtorch again as he grins, looking like a madman, and returns to the panel he was originally working on. “I will come find you when I need to find parts, ja?”

Essek nods again, and wonders if he’s been dismissed—either way, he pulls himself back into the main chambers of the station and lets himself wander.

—

In the end, the parts are only strong enough to push a message through to the next system, where they are nearly as remote as Rosohna-120 is, and rescue is still a few months off. Caleb moves into a dead man’s quarters with his cat, a lithe orange beast who adjusts uncannily well to the lack of gravity. Essek offers to switch quarters, so Caleb does not have to sleep in the bed of a body that hangs outside his window, but Caleb shakes his head as he closes the chamber door, on the fifth night he is on board the station. 

“I do not fear the dead anymore,” he says softly, and that is the last that Essek sees of him for thirty-six hours.

It shouldn’t surprise Essek how easy it is to avoid another person on a space station—he did it to several others for six months before he found himself alone. But he’s spent more time in this place on his own than not by now, and he had gotten used to feeling like he’d filled the space on his own, and yet when another person moves in there is no claustrophobia. Only a continued void, one that mirrors the vacuum of space outside. It will continue to expand to make room for them, until it doesn’t, at least.

But even as long as he will live, if he makes it back to his home—if he even calls the ground his home, with how used to floating he is—he will not live to see the universe turn in on itself.

There is only expansion for him, only a continuation of the void he chases, more and more of it with every fraction of a second. It is an impossible task, chasing it to its end, and yet here he is, on the edge of what they know of it, and only a sliver of what he could learn if only he goes further.

This is what he continues to probe with renewed vigor, the last readings of the instruments that had drawn too much power from the life systems tethering his crewmates to life. And him stuck inside to watch, as it chewed through the energy in the outer systems and then comms, before he was able to cut it off.

And that had been that, leaving him unable to venture onto the surface of the station, not with all suit power dismantled in one fell swoop. In his weakest moments he’d considered that something could’ve gone wrong outside, brought the station down with him on it, and he’d have no systems to leave the airlock to fix it before it crash-landed on the moon below, or simply broke apart, leaving his body floating in orbit with those he has destroyed in his negligence. 

This system has barely seen life and yet he has already made it an open grave.

He swallows hard against the thought and opens the data files, and they appear as holograms in the air as they expand out, rows and rows of numbers that start to come together in his mind, and it feels like gravity has returned enough to let him sink, heavy, into the cushioned seat of his desk. No wonder the probe consumed so much power, with the data it collected. He’s surprised the computer has held it all for so long. 

This, this is what he has been looking for, and he feels dizzy for a second, clinging to the metal of his desk to steady himself. 

“Ah. That would be my wormhole.”

Essek nearly falls out of his seat he has just taken as he swivels to see Caleb in the doorway, cat wrapped around his neck. It—he—can get around just fine, Frumpkin, Caleb called him, but he still prefers to hitch a ride the shoulders of his human. He’s purring so loud that Essek wonders how he did not hear them approach, but he has always been single-minded to a fault when it comes to his research.

“This?” Essek points to the data that glows between them, illuminating both of their faces in a cool blue, before swiping down in the air. It jumps back onto his screen. “You can read it?”

Caleb nods, and, despite some clearly warring instinct on his face, peers toward the screen, shuffling closer into the cramped office. Essek thinks he should turn the screen off, if he were following protocol, but it’s not protocol he hasn’t broken before. 

He shivers as Caleb places a heavy hand on his shoulder to lean toward the data.

“Oh, yes, if those are coordinates—“ he nods, and with a deft flick of his free fingers, sends the points into the air again, but this time they take on the form of a system—a map. “That is where I arrived in this system.”

It certainly looks like a black hole, but not one like any that Essek has ever seen. It is anomalous in its hunger, devouring anything that grows near but never swallowing it altogether, from what he can tell from these basic readings. He stares hungrily back at it, and all of the potential it holds. 

All of their teleportation abilities have not come close to the space this kind of wormhole might span, not to mention the potential _time_ one could cross, if one was brave enough.

He murmurs as much, more a habit of being alone than a comment to Caleb. He scoffs in return, and his hand vanishes from Essek’s shoulder as he turns, but even his incredulous breath betrays a tremor of elation. “That seems… impossible.”

“You yourself have traveled across the cosmos in an instant—“

“Not an instant—“

“In the space of days when such a journey might take decades, and that doesn’t even factor what kind of time distortion might’ve altered how you perceived time inside of it—“

Caleb is already gone though, moving more deftly than Essek has seem him pass through zero gravity yet, and he is left alone with his anomalies and his data. With every passing lonely moment, each an infinity of time to spend with his thoughts, he remembers the sacrifices made to bring him these rows of numbers.

They are so small on his screen, with their neat crawl, and they march down the screen like ants as his autoscroll continues on without him to direct it, like drops of blood.

—

Caleb only appears in glimpses for another week after that. His cat sometimes meanders through Essek’s office, and he wonders whether the man has put any spyware on the animal, but he doesn’t shoo him away. No, he lets him curl up on his knee, an uncomfortable proposition while floating so he tethers them both to the chair, and he runs his hands over Frumpkin’s soft head, finding the fur thicker than it looks, a cat built for northern snows. His throat rumbles beneath Essek’s fingers as he lays on his side happily, content as Essek works.

And in his continued solitude, he finds himself pulling out his little radio when he’s sure he’s alone, and he doesn’t turn it on, but he speaks as though he were speaking to the universe, and sometimes he wonders if the universe might actually respond sometimes, with its gentle nudges even in the face of his arrogance. He is no longer alone here, and time seems to settle again into rhythm. 

He and Caleb eat in the mess pod at the same times, meeting eyes in silence, and he returns to his office with a mouthful of words unspoken. It is after the first meal that he turns his radio back on and offers those words to his star, a cold, uncaring burn. Perhaps it will consume everything he feels now, his soul on fire as though the arrival of another person was a spark against the deadened coal of his heart. 

It is not a feeling he’s used to, reliance. And it is not a feeling entirely comfortable either.

“I will offer up myself to the heart of the void,” he whispers to the sky, head thrown backward against the headrest of the chair, and Frumpkin purrs against his chest. “But I will not offer up another person again.”

He exhales shakily, finding that when he says he will not offer up another person, he means he will not offer up this person, who looked into a black hole that spirited him across the galaxy, to here, and shuddered to think about returning to it. 

—

“Caleb,” he says finally, as he finishes a meal. He’s not sure which meal it is, only that his eating schedule is far more routine than it had been without any accountability. “I don’t know where you’re from.”

“Yes,” Caleb smiles, and leans on the table. His smiles never quite reach his blue eyes, and Essek can’t tell if his crow’s feet are the result of laughing or screaming. Caleb’s fingers press hard into the muscle of his forearms. In all the time he’s been here, nearly a month by now, Essek has only seen him in long sleeves. “I am from outside of Rexxentrum. A small town. Not important.”

“That is farmland,” Essek says with surprise. He hadn’t planned to ask this kind of question, but he is a scientist at heart, and he can’t help but follow the trail where it leads down the rabbit hole. “How did you come to—“

“Space travel?” His eyes glint in the light, and he doesn’t look toward Essek. Essek recognizes the cold sheen of suspicion on his face, of a distrust embedded deep in his psyche. It is a suspicion that Essek has worn for a long time, some of which his time alone has sanded away. Perhaps that is why he waits for the answer longer than he would’ve in the past. Seven months is a long time to learn patience. “I was… always a clever child. It did not go unnoticed.”

Essek knows nothing about the Empire’s space program, except to circumvent it, but he knows bitterness in a voice when he hears it. “And how did you come to be a mercenary, if you worked for the Empire?”

“Ah,” Caleb says, and finally meets his eyes. “That is not a story I know you well enough to tell.”

—

“I brought you something.”

“Mmm, ja, I could smell them from the shuttle bay.”

“I made them.”

“You bake?”

“I learned.”

“I suppose one must find something to do for seven months.”

“That is true.”

“Thank you for the cupcake, in any case. It means a great deal to me. It reminds me of home.”

“Of the Empire?”

“No.”

—

The burning void of the star screams its agony, and he thinks that there is no way a god could be light. Light is violent, scorching. He uses it to hurt himself, scarring his eyes beyond repair. No repair here, at least, though perhaps on solid ground they could be fixed. Perhaps when gravity takes hold of him again he will surrender to the light, rather than fighting it at every turn.

His knees are tight to his chest as he stares into it yet again, out the window as usual, murmuring equations between his lips. The star is not particularly interesting to him—most who seek them from his field report to men like his uncle, in search of places to expand—but it acts, ironically, as a moth; its light should be drawn into the void of the dark star nearby, and he may be able to see it with his failing eyes. 

Caleb settles across from him, folding into the curve of the rounded glass, and follows his gaze. With the light of the star upon him, he too may as well be on fire, and Essek thinks he might burn up without ever stepping foot beyond the metal prison walls of this station.

“The black hole may go the other way,” Essek offers softly. “It’s possible we can follow it back to your friends.”

“My friends will arrive before long,” Caleb replies, and pulls his legs to his chest to mirror Essek’s position. Both of them hover there, mirror images, and stare into the black hole that drew them both to this station, like unwitting moths to a flame. “It would be silly to go chasing them through rifts we know nothing about when we will be rescued soon enough.”

Essek can’t remember if Caleb has referred to them as his friends before, and wonders if that is a result of Essek earning more of his trust or of loneliness crafting a fonder heart, as it did him.

“I have not asked to be rescued,” Essek says. He can pick out a darker spot in the sky, where the stars wink out and the blackness seems to fold in on itself. Found you. “I have plenty of work to continue, here.”

“Your crewmates have already died here,” Caleb snarls. This is not a window out of which either of their tethered bodies can be seen, but the emptiness of the station is reminder enough. “Do you intend to die with them?”

“I don’t intend to die anywhere,” Essek shrugs. “But I will die somewhere, whether tomorrow or centuries from now.”

“Do you ever wonder if this constant chase of the edges of the universe is a fool’s errand?” Essek can’t look at him in his blazing fury, a gentle rage that simmers below the surface of every conversation. This is where that fury feeds, he thinks. This is the hill on which he is willing to die.

Essek has not found such a place.

“If it is, then it is one that I have devoted my life to,” Essek sighs. “That my people have died for. Do I not have a responsibility to see it through?”

He expects the fight, riles to meet it—but when he finally glances to Caleb, his face is pressed against the cool glass and he sighs. “I used to think so. But if I see no one else sacrificed to this void then I will be content.”

For a split second, Essek sees not the rage or the bitterness but the pain beneath it, and he thinks perhaps he could tear apart the sky. He thinks perhaps he could rip that black hole down from where it hangs like a coat on a nail. He thinks perhaps he could burn the sun to ash.

And then the pain is gone, masked again by that simmering anger, and Caleb’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. It is not what Essek thinks it is after all, no pleasant grin—it is bared teeth.

“Caleb,” he murmurs, one hand already reaching out to get close enough to touch Caleb’s tight fingers, but that human smile widens and he presses lightly off from the window, out of reach.

—

Perhaps it is to avoid Essek’s questions that Caleb never asks any of his own, but he still wonders about it.

He has not had to mention how his crewmates died, has not mentioned much of his work, has not spoken of his family or how he found himself on Rosohna-120. These are not questions that Caleb seems to want the answers to, and somehow his indifference to Essek’s existence on this station makes Essek have to bite his tongue not to bring them up of his own volition.

“I have been, um, studying quantum physics, time and space, since… since I was a child,” he finally blurts out, as Caleb polishes his shuttle. It gleams now, nearly unrecognizable since it arrived here, and yet he continues to shine it, Frumpkin sitting in the pilot’s chair as he works. 

“Yes, I hear the Kryn space program is particularly encompassing,” Caleb says, without so much as glancing toward where he hovers in the shuttle bay. Essek had hoped for some kind of company, but he has so far been unsuccessful in engaging in any kind of conversation. He presses on.

“What were your specialties, in your program? The same? You seemed to recognize my data immediately.”

“Transportation,” Caleb grunts. “Getting something from one place to another, in one piece. Perhaps in a different piece than it was originally, but I never quite got there.”

Essek blinks. Pilots who also have a knowledge of transport, of teleportation, are rare. Generally those in this field know one or the other. 

Caleb hadn’t struck him as a pilot anyway, when he’d first arrived, lacking the bravado of the pilots he has met in Wildemount, no matter from which nation they hail.

“Well, you seem quite capable of it,” Essek offers, and now Caleb looks up at him, tossing the rag into the shuttle, where it drops to the ground. Frumpkin watches it fall.

“Do you have a request to make of me?” Caleb asks, pushing himself upright, eyes locking tight to Essek’s with drawn eyebrows. Essek swallows.

“I understand your hesitation to look into my research but…” he shuffles beneath the intensity of the man’s gaze. “I have come across an equation I cannot solve, and hoped you might take a look at it.”

It seems as though he’ll be denied, Caleb’s shoulders squared off from any intrusion, but he wipes the sweat from his hairline and nods, gesturing toward the corridors. “Very well. Show me.”

—

If there’s one thing Caleb can’t seem to resist, it is a challenge. So that’s what Essek brings him, day after day, errant equations and tricky problems outside his purview alone. The nature of the energy that passes through the black hole seems to fall within Caleb’s area of expertise, and he proves invaluable at puzzling out the smaller intricacies of how time and space pass through that area of the sky.

And even as they work, he grows more comfortable with what Essek is working on, and Essek is careful not to mention trying to return the way he’d arrived, whether or not it would be interesting to test his own experiments. Caleb’s shuttle is too worn for another trip anyway, and the only other shuttle left in the bay does not have the fuel capacity to make the journey.

And the longer he knows Caleb, the less he would consider asking him to make the journey. And the longer they work together, the less he considers leaving to make the journey himself, even if he had access to a vessel that would survive.

On the two month anniversary of Caleb’s arrival here, Essek bakes cupcakes again, and Caleb laughs at something strange Essek says—not a joke, really, but he will say it again to hear Caleb laugh like that. For the first time, the smile reaches his blue eyes, his cheeks tinged pink from breathlessness, and Essek cannot help but smile too, wider than he can remember smiling. 

They drink the last box of shitty wine from Caleb’s little cargo hold and let Frumpkin lick blue frosting from their fingers, and Essek’s face is flushed by the time he stumbles back to his quarters, and gathers his radio against his chest. 

“I think a wildfire has found me on the edge of the universe. I think it will consume me, if I let it,” he breathes, and it transmits to whomever might be listening, here on the razor’s edge of the void. “And I may let it consume me still.”

—

“Do you believe in anything… greater?”

“I believe in my friends.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But it is what you asked.”

“…I thought I didn’t. But maybe I do.”

“What do you believe in?”

“I believe in space. And I believe in coincidence. And I believe in chance.”

“I suppose some would consider those greater powers, yes. And do you intend to harness those powers, Mr. Thelyss?”

“I did, yes.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“I know.”

—

The black star that sits further into space than his shuttle will travel taunts him as it chews closer to them, and he spends more time following the light from this sun into its mouth than he does working out equations in his office. He cannot fathom how much matter it consumes as it expands, and yet it will be long past his lifetime before it meets them here, in this little space station that would crumple like paper if it was met with such a field. 

He thinks it would be better to die crushed to death inside of it than it would be to die cold in open space.

Caleb finds him staring every so often, and Essek wonders not for the first time how he is entertaining himself in the days when Essek doesn’t see him leave his quarters. Each section of the barracks are designed to be entirely self-sufficient, so as to close off portions of the station in case of emergency, but they provide the bare minimum necessary to live—that is, the only entertainment is what you bring there yourself. Most of the researchers who work on this kind of station brings their own computer interface—everyone has personal interests and side projects, and their corporate overlords do not ask what those are as long as their primary motivations are to the mission at hand.

Essek has never been good at staying on mission, unfortunately. This assignment was beneficial in that its goals worked in tandem with his own, but above all his loyalty is to his own research. 

“Have you ever seen dark matter?” Caleb asks once, arms crossed as he settles into place in the window across from him. Sometimes they sit like that in silence for hours, greeting each other with a nod and saying nothing until one of them moves to another part of the station. When there is near infinite time to talk, there is often little point in doing so. Neither of them are particularly talkative individuals, and they could easily tire of it if either of them tried to demand it. “Up close, anyway?”

Essek swallows, thinks of a childhood fear of the dark, of the way he cloaked himself in shadow to learn to love it instead. Now he thinks that blindness would be preferable, though is blindness consuming light or the absence of it? He doesn’t know.

“Yes. A long time ago.”

Caleb doesn’t ask another question, and he doesn’t look to Essek. He keeps his eye instead on the star, and when Essek follows his gaze, he thinks he finds the solar flares around its edges, rather than staring directly into its heart. He knows and accepts what is bad for him far better than Essek does.

“When I was a child, my aunt showed me contained dark matter in her lab. She, ah,” he wrinkles his nose at the memory, goosebumps shivering across his arms. “She fed a cat to it.”

Those blue eyes flash, though Essek isn’t sure if it’s a trick of the light reflected in them. “Why?”

“To show me what the darkness can do to a person,” Essek sighed. “The Kryn, we… worship a light deity. It will rescue us from the dark, help us to control it, destroy it.” Even here, far beyond the reaches of his culture, he has to calm his hesitation, vomit up the words before he can swallow them down again. “I don’t have any interest in such a being, but my mother and my aunt, well. They thought I needed to be scared along the right path.” He smiles, and meets Caleb’s eyes for the first time, just for a moment before both of them find the star again. “I have never believed in the thing, but I have never again spoken aloud the questions I would like to ask of it.”

“Yes, fear certainly puts a person on the path they are groomed to take,” Caleb agrees. “It does nothing to answer to uncertainty.”

Essek cannot argue with that—he has never ceased to have questions because of that moment, only slept with a candle lit for too long and never managed to stomach owning a cat. 

That decision, though, he has been rethinking now, with Frumpkin on board the station, keeping him company at times. It is nice to have a quiet companion whose only judgment is how late you are to its feeding times and how long you commit to scratching it around the ears.

“So how did you come to be so fascinated by it?”

“My aunt, my mother—they both abhore this thing, and yet they obsess over it. And I cannot help but obsess over it as well—that, at least, I have inherited from them, but for very different reasons, I suppose.” He chuckles and grins at Caleb without mirth. “Have you ever put a button labeled ‘Do not touch’ in front of a child?”

Caleb doesn’t return the smile. “Why do you find yourself drawn to something you fear so terribly?”

“What makes you think I still fear the dark?”

“A day has not passed of my being here that you have not sat in front of this window and found the light of the star.”

“I am not a moth.”

“We are all moths,” Caleb retorts. “We are all striving toward illumination one way or another, even if that illumination is to be found in darkness.”

Essek doesn’t tear his eyes from the star, doesn’t turn away from the searing pain of the light, vision narrowed enough that he doesn’t see Caleb move toward him until he takes Essek’s chin in his hand, narrow fingers warm against his cool skin, and presses a kiss to his forehead. Frozen, Essek meets his eyes, lips parted in a question that he can’t ask.

“I do not know what guilt you are trying to burn out of yourself,” he says softly, “but do not let it blind you.”

—

“Have _you_ seen dark matter up close?”

“I came here through a black hole.”

“Ah, right.”

—

It was inevitable, he thinks. The bodies of his crewmates are visible in several windows, and with their rescue party drawing nearer, Caleb finds him in the corridor one day, already wearing a faded flight suit, and offers to retrieve the corpses.

“Your external life systems are inoperable, yes,” he acknowledges, at Essek’s hesitation, “but I can bring them into the station with my shuttle.”

Part of Essek would like to say that seeing them hanging there doesn’t bother him, that he’s grown so used to it that his gaze skims passed them without much consideration for what they are. But in reality, he has only learned where not to look, memorized the windows where he averts his eyes when he walks. 

Still, that isn’t the reason he shakes his head.

“We only have the facilities to freeze one body,” he sighs. 

Caleb frowns. “Why? This station is built to be manned by at least three people.”

“If one of us dies on the outside, the others can retrieve them without much difficulty. If two of us dies… then the third would only be endangering themself to follow after them. It is designed to be an impossible choice—how do you choose which family sees their child returned to them? Better to wait for any rescue that may be coming, and let them handle the bodies.”

“That is… very cold,” Caleb says. 

“Welcome to the Kryn Dynasty.”

Caleb unzips the top of the flight suit, revealing a white t-shirt beneath. “Will you tell me what happened?”

Essek smiles as cold as the culture that created him, every spark burned from his heart long ago. He had thought it returned with Caleb’s arrival, maybe, but perhaps guilt has quenched it again. “I think you can look for yourself, if you care to.”

“I would not want to betray your trust.”

“Caleb,” he breathes, and closes his eyes. “My trust does not get you home. But yours… if you had not found me, it is likely that we both would’ve died out here.”

“Then it is as fortunate for me as it is for you that we have found each other here.”

—

Essek thinks about the nature of guilt, the way his comes and goes in waves. It is strongest when he sees a hint of copper hair leaving a room he has just entered without so much as a glance, twinging in his collarbone and his sternum and the bridge of his nose.

It is strongest when he thinks about what would become of him if Caleb left him here, left with his shuttle in the night and met his friends halfway across this system, spoke of him to no one. It would be easy to claim that Essek had died sometime between their distress call and their rescue, and Essek has no wish to die, but he cannot say he would blame Caleb for leaving behind a man whose ambition and arrogance got his only companions horribly killed.

And if Caleb were to discover the full nature of his ambition and arrogance, then Essek thinks he would likely already be gone. 

—

“Once you return to Rosohna, will you ever leave the safety of the planet again?”

“I don’t think I will have the opportunity.”

“Oh?”

“Surely you have learned of my failings here.”

“Well. Overzealous mistakes do not warrant a death sentence.”

“There is no room for carelessness here, not for my own personal curiosities.”

“If you had the opportunity, then. Would you leave the surface again?”

“If I had the opportunity, I don’t think I would return to the surface in the first place.”

“Well, I could always leave you here, if you would like.”

“Ha. What about you?”

“Oh, I have already made that decision once before.”

“And?”

“I no longer run from the things I fear.”

—

The thing he fears is this: the knowledge that one day, he will die, and his curiosities span too far for them to ever be satisfied by the time that day comes. 

The thing he fears is this: when he returns home, he will likely be grounded from this mission, put on tribunal for his actions, and never granted access to a space shuttle or a teleportation pad again. He is used to floating, now, used to zero gravity, and he cannot fathom to imagine the kind of weight the ground offers to him now. Though the entire planet will be beneath his feet, it will feel as though he is carrying it on his shoulders instead, the burden of the sky his to bear alone for eternity.

The thing he fears is this: these are not the worst burdens that rest upon his shoulders.

—

It has been nineteen days since he sat in that window, and he gathers his radio in his hands as he floats through the corridors, seeking out soft fingers and hair aflame, and finally finds them in the shuttle bay, dusting the cockpit of anything it has accumulated in the several months span they have spent here. The localized gravitational field inside bolts his feet to the carpeted floor. It is not a place Essek has entered, too fearful of the weight of it. 

His fingers tremble as he grips the side of the shuttle before stepping inside, and he feels briefly as though his lungs compress as gravity grips him again, knees nearly buckling beneath the weight of it. It has been eighteen months since he felt this sensation, and even after so many decades of knowing the pull of gravity does not make it easier to get used to again. 

Caleb shifts to look at him from his crouched spot beneath the console, a dust rag in his hand and a wry smile on his face. “You see why I spend time here regularly. So I don’t get so used to weightlessness. Adjusting is not easy.”

“Normally it is not so instant,” Essek says as he falls into the pilot’s chair, pressing his free hand to his forehead. “It’s why we do not teleport to the surface, only reenter the atmosphere via shuttle.”

“Yes, well, we do teleport to the surface, as we simply choose not to spend much time in zero gravity,” Caleb laughs, and returns to his dusting. 

The shuttle is pristine inside; Essek wonders why Caleb still bothers to dust it. There is very little in this recycled air system that would settle here, and whatever does, he has no doubt that Frumpkin’s fur gathers it, as the cat shifts where he sleeps on the unlit controls. 

“What did you hear?” he asks finally, and sets the radio down on the ground. It’s an uncanny sensation, the feeling of things _settling_ , after so many months of weightlessness. “When you were in that black hole—what broadcasts reached you, from my radio?”

Caleb sits back on his heels and tosses the rag on the console beside his cat. “Why? Something you wouldn’t want me to hear?”

Essek swallows hard. “I’m trying to gauge the nature of the wormhole. Did you receive only the previous few days of broadcasts, or did you get bits and pieces over months? How does time pass inside?”

Caleb rests against the wall, stretching his legs out long in front of him, and kicks Essek’s foot, hanging from legs crossed over one another. “Perhaps I do not want to speak about the journey I have made.”

“You are the only person I have known who has passed through a black hole and lived. I may never have the chance to record this kind of data again.”

“And maybe you shouldn’t,” he sighs, and runs his hands over his face. The light in the cockpit is dim, a yellow glow more than actual illumination, and he realizes for the first time that this is the only time he has seen Caleb’s arms bare, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. In this light, it is just possible to make out darker lines crisscrossing the skin in an array of geometric patterns, and his heart leaps to his throat.

“You were in the Scourger program,” he breathes, and Caleb meets his eyes, then looks down at his arms. He pulls the sleeves down to hide the patterns.

“Yes,” he nods tiredly. “How much do you know of it?”

Essek shakes his head, thoughts flashing to intelligence collected by braver men than him, their weapons in the space race that continues to wage beneath the ripples of international relations of the Dynasty and the Empire. “What we were able to obtain from spies. Nothing more.”

“Well, the matter of the training—that is one thing. You must have similar programs. Dark matter weapons, grafted into living beings.”

“No, no. It is against our beliefs, integrating dark matter into our beings.”

“Oh, well, I suppose that would make sense.” Essek has not cried in all of the time he has spent here since the accident, but the hollow shine in Caleb’s eyes as he talks makes him want to. “I was… I was meant to see if they could transport me across the universe, without need for equipment, among plenty of other uses. A soldier who could jump anywhere in an instant, with all of the weapons at a Scourger’s disposal—well, I could’ve been a ghost.”

It is not in Essek’s nature to leave questions unasked, as much as that nature has been trained out of him, and he does not hesitate to ask, “What went wrong?”

“Nothing,” Caleb says. “I did everything that was asked of me, and I did it very well. But you don’t realize what kind of weapon you are becoming, when you are alone there, and—“ he takes a heavy breath, heavier than the gravity in this shuttle, mass like the black hole Essek has been studying for months. “The directors of the program believe that… if you choose to be a weapon, choose to give yourself wholly to the cause of the Empire, you must make the first sacrifices. And after the weapons we had become were utilized on enemies of the Empire, we were directed to turn to our families. Siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. I was lucky that all that I had left were my parents, and then… suddenly, they were gone as well, and I think I must’ve… woken up, very suddenly.”

“What—“ Essek swallows against the cotton feeling that has taken over his tongue. “What did they order you to do?”

“I watched my mother and father be consumed by dark matter that I had created from my fingertips,” he murmurs, and Essek notices the blackened tint to the pads of his fingers. He has always assumed it was soot, grime from the shuttle, maybe, but the shuttle is spotless—it has been for two months, at least—and the color is still there. “They had been in stasis—until it didn’t hold them anymore, and they screamed as it devoured them, and I… I broke. I couldn’t handle it. Well, I suppose everyone in the program breaks, that day—you either rip a piece of yourself out, or you lose your mind. There is no compromise.”

Essek thinks of every stupid threat he’d made to his brother growing up, about feeding him to a black hole. It makes his blood run cold. 

“What I’m trying to say—“ he stands, and gathers up his cat in his arms, the little _mrrrp_ of displeasure that Frumpkin makes at being moved out of place in their current conversation, “what I am trying to say, is that perhaps I survived the black hole because I am made of that darkness.”

He leaves Essek to the weight of his thoughts and the gravity of what he has learned.

—

“My friends will be here for us tomorrow.”

“Ah. Good.”

“Should I… can I still expect you to leave with us?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you in the morning.”

—

Essek sits up in the mess hall and stares out the window, nursing a glass of whiskey with hunched shoulders and hungry eyes. This sun is redder than their own, the flame’s color as strong as Caleb’s hair and convictions, and he feels as though the light is pulled like a moth to the dark matter that threatens to consume his heart. 

—

“Essek? It is late—“

“I couldn’t— I didn’t—“

“What is it?” He takes Essek’s frantic face in his hands. “Is something wrong?”

“I think—“ He’s going to lose his nerve. “I needed to do this. Before we leave tomorrow.”

He leans forward and presses his mouth to Caleb’s lips, then pulls away just as quickly. Caleb blinks at him, before he drags them together again, and Essek finds himself surprised at the ferocity of his response, and he is breathless by the time Caleb pulls away. “That felt like a goodbye,” Caleb murmurs, and presses their foreheads together. “We are leaving together, you said.”

“Yes, but that does not mean we are not parting,” Essek smiles sadly, and shakes his head. “Whatever we are here, it exists here. Nothing else is a guarantee.”

Caleb nods, and Essek doesn’t think he notices that his blackened fingertips absently pass over his lips. “I suppose that is true.” He glances back to his quarters. “Would you like to stay the night?”

He is the one who has arrived here in pajamas, at Caleb’s door, been invited in now, and still he hesitates. “Ah, I—“

“Only to sleep, nothing more,” Caleb offers, and Essek’s chest feels as though it might collapse, a counterweight to everything he doesn’t deserve.

“I would like that.”

—

When Caleb wakes, Essek is gone, and Caleb’s rickety shuttle with him.

—

The void of space is empty around him, but the gravity within the shuttle feels like a vice grip on his limbs as he pilots it toward the dark star, its mouth gaping wide, an invitation to oblivion. It is all he deserves, after all, the harvest of his work.

Appropriate that he should feed himself to it, just to know its nature.

Essek understands that, the need to consume. He and this black hole are not so different, but it is far more effective in its devouring than he has ever been. His efforts have only ever brought hurt—pain that he thought he could excuse on his path to greatness.

Oblivion is all that he deserves.

The comms panel on his console lights up, crackling as it accepts a radio frequency he knows. “ _Essek—_ “ Caleb’s voice snarls, marred by static, and his fingers hovering over the power button pauses. He can’t bring himself to block him out—he was only hoping it might take longer for him to notice Essek’s absence. 

“I have to do this,” he says through gritted teeth, gripping the controls with renewed drive. “I cannot return with you.”

“Why?” Caleb snaps, and Essek drags a hand over his face. It is agony to continue to fly, leaving behind the fire of the star and the warmth of the only person Essek has seen in months. It won’t matter, once he enters this wormhole. Nothing will matter after that.

“Because I need to know,” he stammers. “Because… I have spent my whole life on this path, left wreckage in my path, and I cannot let it be a waste.”

“The death of your crew—“

“I gave the Assembly all of the data they have on dark matter containment, Caleb.” The radio is silent, a low crackle the only response, and he thinks maybe he should stop talking, but if this is a final confession, then he will let the truth live in the light. “My people want to contain it, but… once you have it, why not _use_ it?”

“Not everything should be _used._ ”

It is something he has only recently begun to grasp. “Perhaps not.”

The computer flashes with a warning across the glass of the window—only a minute until he reaches the gravity field of the black hole, and he is lost to it. Good. 

“Essek. Listen to me. You need to turn around.”

“I can’t.”

“Then you damn us both. Because I am in the other shuttle, and I don’t have enough fuel to return to the station.”

Essek slows suddenly, enough to monitor the tracking screen. Behind him, just on the edge of his monitor, a blip of light follows, a red spark against the blackness. 

“ _Damn you!_ ” he snarls, and slams his hand into the console before pulling off course and turning to the small station shuttle, and it comes into view as the dot on the screen grows closer. It is smaller than Caleb’s, sleek in its design, and this craft is just large enough to board it. When he is close enough to see Caleb’s face, the other man is grim, but triumphant. 

—

“You _bastard._ ”

“Well, you took my cat.”

Essek glances around the shuttle as Caleb settles into the co-pilot’s seat, and finds Frumpkin peacefully asleep on a rack overhead, both of them unaware of the other’s presence. 

“Don’t do that again,” Caleb says, charting a course back to the station, and Essek nearly cowers beneath the intensity of his gaze as their eyes meet. “You fucking idiot, don’t do that again.”

They are still caught in the gravity of the shuttle, but Essek feels as though he can let out a breathe he was holding through his jaunt toward oblivion. 

“Okay.”

“For all you have done, that is not a fate you deserve.”

“Okay.”

“Perhaps you cannot appreciate it,” Caleb continues, “but your work does not have to define you. Your bad decisions do not have to define you. You choose what you do, right now.” His fingers find Essek’s hand, and he squeezes them tightly. “That wormhole scared the shit out of me. It was everything that I—“ his words hitch in his throat, but he continues in spite of it. “—loathe about myself. And when it caught me, I embraced it regardless. Do you understand?”

Essek nods, mute, his fingers warm in Caleb’s grasp.

As they close the gap between the shuttle and the station, another blip of light appears on the monitor, larger, and the radio flickers again.

“Caleb!” a cheerful voice calls, and Essek can hear the love in it, the warmth. No wonder this man glows with it even when his face is shrouded in rage, when this is what he is greeted with after months of distance. “Caleb, where are you going?”

“We were taking a quick farewell tour of the system,” Caleb lies easily, and Essek can see plainly the ways he has constructed himself from the pain that he has learned. His arms bear the marks of darkness and he has embraced it as much as he has chosen his path forward. “We will meet you at the base.”

He shuts off the comms channel, and takes Essek’s hand again. 

“Will you come home with us?”

“I don’t think I have much of a home to go back to, in Rosohna.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Essek swallows against the questions that threaten to come tumbling out. _What did you ask? What does home mean to you? Why do you think I would stay, when this station only felt like a home once you arrived?_

Light is drawn like a moth into the dark matter of this system, but what it spat out was Caleb. A dark star and a furious flame, at the same time. As it turns out, Essek is the moth after all, but Caleb is the thing with such a pull that he cannot resist following.

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you thought!


End file.
